"Am I a Racist? Are you a Racist? Read Below Article.......

New York Governor David Paterson gave one of the keynote addresses at the NAACP's 99th annual convention at Cincinnati last week. According to one newspaper account he “suggested that the defeat of Senator Obama in the presidential election would be a victory for racism in America.”

Huh????? Is Governor Paterson implying that anyone who votes against Barack Obama is a racist????? Can’t someone vote against him because they don’t trust his flip-flopping on major issues? Or they worry a President Obama will join the ranks of Presidents Hoover and Carter and raise taxes during a recession? Or they think Senator Obama’s plan for immediate withdrawal from Iraq would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Or they suspect his brand of “aggressive diplomacy” with Iran would result in an Iranian nuclear arsenal? Or they believe he’s too inexperienced and untried to be president in these precarious times?

Is this what political correctness has brought us to? That we are now a nation of people who are assumed to cast our votes, not on the basis of a candidate’s record or policies, but merely on the basis of his race and ethnicity?

If so, we can forget about America. Because our greatest strength, the reason for our vitality, our creativity, our energy, our unprecedented success, is that we are a nation of the most diverse people in history. That we believe through hard work and initiative a person can rise above the circumstances of his birth. That in America a person can be anything he wants to be.

Are we to take that extraordinary advantage, the quality that makes us the envy of the world, turn it on its head, and make it our greatest weakness? America will become a nation of broken dreams if we are a nation divided, balkanized into dozens of groups pitted against each other, divided by the color of our skin, or our gender, or the year of our birth, or where our grandparents came from.

In fairness to Governor Paterson, he did talk about the need for all Americans to move beyond race, and movingly about his own experiences as an African American. But his very premise, that Senator Obama’s defeat will be a victory for racism, is twisted logic. It is by very definition…well….racist.

Think about it. By Governor Paterson’s line of reasoning, is anyone who voted against Hillary Clinton a sexist who discriminates against women? Or anyone who votes against John McCain an ageist who discriminates against people over 65?

The fundamental principle of our democracy is that people vote. That means somebody has to lose. American voters hail from every racial, religious, and ethnic group. If you follow Governor Paterson’s logic, the most important difference between our two presidential candidates is race. Not only is that morally offensive, it is just downright wrong. And it is this line of thinking, this extreme political correctness, that pits American against American. It may have begun with the best of intentions, but political correctness has now become the very thing it was supposed to defeat.

Is it racist or sexist for a person to be sick and tired of political correctness? A number of journalists have remarked on the difficulty of applying the same scrutiny to America’s first serious African-American candidate for President lest they be accused of discrimination. So they have erred on the side of handling Sen. Obama with kid gloves. But no one disputes they traded the kid gloves for brass knuckles when it came to Hillary Clinton. She was running neck and neck with Barack Obama during the primaries, but the pundits chanted a constant chorus calling for her to get out of the race. Does that mean they are sexist?

Some people will no doubt brand me a racist for criticizing Governor Paterson’s speech, but it is about time someone stood up to say that political correctness has gone to far. It may have made sense years ago, but today stands in the way of us working together to solve our problems. Enough already. Let’s stop thinking of ourselves as African-Americans or Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans or Hispanic-Americans or Asian-Americans or native-Americans. Let’s all just be Americans.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor KT McFarland is a former top Pentagon official in the Reagan Administration and a frequent commentator on national security issues and foreign affairs. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org